


Interference

by Arsenic, arsenicarcher (Arsenic)



Series: 14 Valentines [39]
Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-12
Updated: 2012-02-12
Packaged: 2020-07-27 23:24:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20054254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/pseuds/Arsenic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/pseuds/arsenicarcher
Summary: Prim's POV in the first book.  Written for the "women and media" theme of 14v 2012.





	Interference

Kat’s name was the first word Prim remembered saying. She didn’t know if it was actually her first word or not, and asking her mother seemed almost dangerous, the way reminding mother about anything in the past might be. It did not really matter, it was the sense Prim had of the importance of Kat that made the memory, and finding out the truth was not going to change that one bit.

What mattered was that Kat had always been so much a part of her world, maybe more than she should have been. Prim didn’t care so much about shoulds and shouldn’ts. So far as she could tell, they hadn’t gotten much of anyone in District 12 anywhere. She cared about her sister, who was gone now, in the Capital. The sister whose face she knew better than her very own.

The sister she had to stare at the public screens with intensity to recognize at the opening ceremony. In her mind, Prim had known they would made Kat look different. None of the tributes had ever looked the same at the opening, they were always primped and styled and made to look slightly unreal. Kat was all at once no different and completely different.

Kat was the most beautiful thing in District 12, so it should have been no surprise that she was radiant on the screen, but it was the sculpted, modeled splendor that threw Prim. Kat was gorgeous because of her athleticism, the dirt often smudged on her cheeks, the smile few people got to see, not despite those things. She was gorgeous because she was a big sister, a provider, a risk-taker, not because she was a tribute.

Kat was somewhere inside the girl Prim was seeing on the screens, Prim could look deep enough to find her, but it was torture, having to puzzle out something Prim had always known so well.

*

The interview was both easier and harder on Prim. Because having a voice made Kat herself again, at least a little, but her voice was altered slightly by the technology of the relay, and her answers were guarded. Prim told herself that Kat outside of District 12 was a different Kat, by necessity. Certainly, a Kat being watched by everyone was. Kat had never liked eyes on her, said it made her feel more like the prey than the hunter. Prim’s throat burned as she remembered, so she made herself forget.

Kat twirled, ablaze, and giggled, something Prim could only recall with the vagueness of a child’s memory, a small sound compared to the conspiratorial laughter of their father. Then Kat talked about her, Prim, about promises, and Prim kept her eyes on this half-Kat, this Kat who was surviving a forest of manmade buildings with manmade traps, infinitely scarier, Prim thought, than anything beyond the fence.

Prim kept her eyes on the screen. If Kat was going to keep her promise to return, Prim was going to keep her own promise, the one she’d made silently, to never leave Kat alone.

*

Ironically—infuriatingly—a Kat in danger was one Prim knew and didn’t have to question. Even in the two dimensional broadcast, there was something achingly _right_ about Kat scaling trees, dragging herself further than she thought she could, taking everything life threw at her and not quitting.

It was hell, watching, wishing she could be the one to treat Kat’s burns, watch over her as she slept. She hated Rue so much she thought she might actually be physically ill from it. She was ill when Rue was killed, as much for Kat as for her own guilt over her relief that she couldn’t be replaced by this better, more useful version of herself.

It was even worse hell not watching. Prim stayed awake as many hours as she could, pulled herself from school and work more than she should have—nobody said a thing, if anything, they silently condoned it through glances, pats, small gifts of food—but she could not watch every hour of every day. And she was terrified she would miss something, that somehow one of the others would get the better of Kat and Prim wouldn’t be there, Kat would be alone.

Even when Kat was given Peeta—and that was easier to take than Rue, no matter how much she hated herself for feeling that way—Prim still could not stop watching. This Kat still wasn’t her Kat, not precisely, there were too many cameras between them, cameras Kat was all-too-aware of for Kat of District 12 to come out completely, but it was Kat, all the same. And Prim couldn’t let that Kat go, not without Prim’s version of a fight.

*

As terrified as Prim was, the only, _only_ time she saw her Kat, Katniss Everdeen of District 12, on the screen was in that moment when the berries touched her lips, poised to spill deadly juice: one last, defiant afternoon snack. Prim swallowed at the thought, and before the victory was even announced, she turned away from the screen.


End file.
